Max Musing

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

This should be pretty doable in any language. Go with whatever you're most familiar with.

That being said, there's a case to be made for using Node.js since it's trivial to convert an object to JSON and vice versa.

From my experience of the early startup world, a majority of companies these days use Node.js. Python and Go are the next biggest languages, but significantly smaller than Node.

However, if you're having trouble with the front end aspect of Django, using Node probably won't make that easier for you. You'll have a lot more options between front end frameworks (React, Vue.js, Angular 2) , but they'll definitely take more time to learn than Django's templating system.

Think about whether you want to focus on front end or back end for now, and make a decision from there.

Most front end frameworks these days are built around the concept of "reactivity" (not exclusive to React). This means that you describe the content of your UI in a declarative way, rather than imperative, as you would with plain JavaScript or something like jQuery.

For example, say you have a counter app, where clicking a button increases the count. With a traditional imperative coding style, clicking the button would trigger code to increment a variable, then update the value of the counter text with that variable. On the other hand, in a declarative style, clicking the button would trigger code only to increment the variable. Your framework would automatically detect that the value changed and update the counter text accordingly.

This makes your life much easier. You no longer have to worry about keeping the DOM in sync with your application state. Your framework does it for you.

Most web applications these days use a declarative framework, like Angular 2, React, or Vue.js. At BaseDash we use React — it's got a big community with wide support and lots of useful libraries. I've heard good things about Vue too.

Hey Mohd. Those are pretty good areas to start with. For front end, focus on getting really good at JavaScript and React. Specifically, learn how to manage state in complex apps. You might want to learn Redux to help with this. Make sure you're using semantic elements in your JSX and get good at using flexbox in your CSS 3. I wouldn't necessarily use Bootstrap, it's good practice to build components yourself. A good exercise is to try to replicate a website like StackOverflow or ProductHunt from scratch.

On backend, ExpressJS is a good place to start. Learn how to build semantic REST APIs that pull data from a database. MongoDB is fine, but I would suggest using Mongoose along with it to avoid nesting objects too much. You could alternatively use a SQL database like PostgreSQL, with an ORM like Sequelize to manage the data.

It's probably worth investing some time for your team to learn Node.js. There's very little overhead, especially with a framework like ExpressJS, so if your team is familiar with JavaScript it should be a quick process.

It handles I/O really well out of the box, and has a strong community with great open source libraries. Since you're using React on the front end, there's also some benefit to being able to use JavaScript throughout your stack.

How are you managing your PostgreSQL schema? It doesn't have to be hard to add or remove fields. We're working on a SQL database client at BaseDash that lets you add/remove columns in a couple clicks.

If you decide to migrate some of your data to MongoDB, you can definitely manage the two databases in parallel. For any records that need to be linked, you can treat it just like a foreign key by creating a column that points to an ID in the other database. For example, you might store user settings in MongoDB, and include a UserId field that points to your User record in your Postgres database.

Go with Node.js. There's something really satisfying about being able to use a single language across your entire tech stack. Especially once you integrate GraphQL, which is effectively JSON.

Your second best option is Go, but the ecosystem around Node.js is quite a bit stronger. This will play a big factor when you start building functionality like file management, messaging (especially in real-time), and authentication. The libraries and documentation are just stronger for Node.

Node.js and ExpressJS is a good choice for backend, the stack makes it really easy to build a REST API.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by using ExpressJS as an admin panel. Express is a lightweight backend framework for Node.js that lets you build your endpoints quickly and with minimal code. If you're looking for an admin panel to manage the data on your mobile app, check out BaseDash. It lets you view and edit data from your SQL database with the simplicity of Airtable.

Socket.IO is great for building real-time systems like chat. It's effectively a nice wrapper around WebSockets, with the ability to fallback to other methods for browsers that don't support it. We just used it to implement real-time collaboration at BaseDash, including a chat system like you're looking to build.

Node.js is probably the correct choice, especially if you're already familiar with it You'll probably still need to build an API to send requests to your server, and then use Socket.IO to push messages to your clients. This will let you authenticate users and store messages on your database so you can retrieve them later. PostgreSQL and MongoDB are good options for your database, you should be fine either way. Don't worry about speed, they'll both be sufficient.

React on the front end makes it really simple to handle real-time updating data. Again, even better since you're already familiar.